The Yousry Case, or New Perils of Taking Too Long on Your Dissertation (Edmundson)

“Translator’s Conviction Raises Legal Concerns: Trial Transcripts Show Lack of Evidence” (Jan. 16, 2006), by Washington Post staff writers Michael Powell and Michelle Garcia, raises troubling questions about prosecutorial tactics in the war on terror.  The Post writes:

For three years federal agents trailed Mohammed Yousry, a chubby 50-year-old translator and U.S. citizen who worked for radical lawyer Lynne Stewart. Prosecutors wiretapped his phone, and FBI agents shadowed and interviewed him. They read his books and notepads and every file on his computer.

This was their conclusion: “Yousry is not a practicing Muslim. He is not a fundamentalist,” prosecutor Anthony Barkow acknowledged in his closing arguments to a jury in federal district court in Manhattan.... “Mohammed Yousry is not someone who supports or believes in the use of violence.”

Still, the prosecutor persuaded the jury to convict Yousry of supporting terrorism. Yousry now awaits sentencing in March, when he could face 20 years in prison for translating a letter from imprisoned Muslim cleric Omar Abdel Rahman [a/k/a "Sheik Omar," "the Blind Sheik"] to Rahman’s lawyer in Egypt. In June 2000, Stewart released to a reporter a version of the letter, which discussed a cease-fire between Islamic militants and the Egyptian government. Prosecutors said that the lawyer and the translator, by these acts, conspired to use Rahman’s words to incite others to carry out kidnappings and killings. No attack took place.

“Kill who? What are they talking about?” Yousry asked recently as he sat alongside his wife, Sarah, an evangelical Christian, in their modest Connecticut condominium. “The words I'm looking for, it’s insane.”

The Post describes how Yousry became engaged as translator for Rahman’s defense team:

In 1995, Yousry’s translation agency offered him a job with the legal defense team for Rahman, a prominent Egyptian radical who was accused of conspiring to blow up the United Nations building and the Holland and Lincoln tunnels. Yousry struck up a cordial if fractious relationship with Rahman, who speaks little English. “He liked to torture me about drinking and not praying and all that good stuff,” Yousry recalled.

In October 1995, Rahman was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Stewart and former attorney general Ramsey Clark, a courtly Texan with decidedly left-wing politics, set about trying to persuade the United States to transfer Rahman to an Egyptian prison. They asked Yousry to return to the case in 1997.

Yousry declined-–he wanted to write his dissertation and teach.  His adviser, historian Zachary Lockman, suggested a marriage of academics and work. “Knowing that he would have access to the FBI tapes and to Rahman, I suggested a biography of Rahman and his movement,” Lockman said. “I guess I’m responsible in a very sad way for the trouble he’s in.”

Although the conviction of codefendant Lynne Stewart has gotten wide attention (e.g., this Blog, Feb. 16, 2005), the justice of Yousry’s treatment began to come into focus when, a month after the trial, a female juror, “Juror 39,” complained to trial judge John G. Koeltl of hysteria in the jury room.  Some of her fellow jurors “had an agenda,” Juror 39 told The Post.  “People are so fearful that if you disagree with the government on one thing it makes you a terrorist.”  The presiding judge denied motions for a new trial, despite Juror 39's disowning her guilty vote as ''only as a result of the fear and intimidation I was made to feel for my life....Never in my life did I imagine that I could be intimidated or coerced into rendering a verdict against my will, but that is exactly what occurred.”

    Yousry’s conviction, according to The Post, “raises many troubling questions, not least how a court-appointed translator working on instruction from lawyers could be held responsible for navigating complicated and dangerous legal waters.”  Central to the government’s case was an undertaking by Clarke and Stewart to abide by Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) that elaborately restricted Rahman's access to media and others inside and outside prison walls.  Although the SAMs restricted defense counsel's use of translators to “legal matters,” the SAMs did not purport to deny Rahman the right to consult privately with counsel, nor did they require counsel to acquiesce in eavesdropping.  Yousry was not a party to the SAMs agreement. 

    Perhaps the most chilling detail revealed by The Post is that

In the spring of 2002, a federal prosecutor suggested Yousry testify if the government indicted Stewart and Clark. This was confirmed by a federal law enforcement source. “They wanted me to entrap Lynne and Ramsey,” Yousry said. “I said no.”

Turning a member of a criminal defense team against a former Attorney General of the United States is high-stakes poker (who could be so bold?).  But failure to become a cooperating witness does not make a case; so what-–besides having the irrepressible Stewart and one of Rahman's henchmen as codefendants-–was the government’s case against Yousry?  It rested upon Yousry's presence in meetings between Stewart and Rahman in which, as revealed by surreptitious videotaping, Stewart tried--by chattering and clattering--to frustrate possible eavesdropping by prison guards.  The Post reports:

“He stuck his head in the sand and deliberately avoided knowing what would have been obvious,” prosecutor Robin Baker told the jury. “We don't need to prove why.”

But, according to The Post, the “Why?” question wasn’t left entirely to the jurors’ imaginations:

Prosecutors [not only] argued that Yousry metaphorically closed his eyes to the bad characters around him. They noted that he padded his résumé and suggested that he addressed Rahman as “spiritual master” to show allegiance; in fact, it’s a common Arabic honorific. Prosecutors speculated that Yousry betrayed the nation in hopes of gaining a Harvard teaching position.

Juror 39 recounted what ensued when the jury retired to deliberate:

“A woman was in tears she was so scared of terrorism....Another kept asking why it took Yousry so long to finish his dissertation, that it was suspicious.”

(The Daily Kos is running a grad-student poll on the question of what taking too long on the dissertation might mean-–click here to participate.)  Yousry and his co-defendants were found guilty on all counts last February.

    The Right has been more attentive to Yousry’s fate than the Left.  The Rightist site The One Republic (Jan. 18, 2006) writes: “Prosecutors were able to show that Yousry was aware that he was helping Stewart break the law [i.e., the SAMs] because he had written about the communications ban the government had imposed in his New York University doctoral thesis.”  --After all, what better place to bury one’s guilty knowledge? 

    Anticipating that The Post story heralds a liberal whitewash, the sweltering New York Sun warns, in “The Case of the Terror Interpreter” (Jan. 17, 2006):

No doubt the [“terror”] interpreter conveys the impression of being a kindly scholar. But it is one of the facts in the kind of twilight war being levied against our country that not everyone is what they seem and danger comes in disguises.

CUNY, where Yousry taught as an adjunct, took no chances, and–-without troubling with academic due process–-summarily dismissed him in the wake of his indictment.  (The full AAUP Report is here.) 

    “Danger comes in disguises,” indeed.